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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

the idea of potentially walking among clones made me sick

ps: its not a moral judgement, just gut feeling (this is the first time I considered it a reality)

>the idea of potentially walking among clones made me sick

Well for sure you are walking among "test tube babies" (IVF) where an egg is fertilized by donor sperm and transferred into a uterus, (sometimes the biological mother and sometimes a non-biological "host").

I don't really see the difference from starting with donor sperm and donor egg and starting with donor cell and donor egg.

Admittedly I have read all kinds of case law in this area (not clones but parental rights with respect to biological mothers/children and host mothers), so perhaps I am a little desensitized to the uniqueness and reality of birthing options made available today.

Fair point, but IVF are a single new person, not an existing one you'd copy.

Are you also scared of twins?

You're also walking among many, many real-life clones. They occur naturally at a rate of about 1 in 400 births.

This is what I was looking for. I mean... Twins right. Sources are great though. Sauce?

My mother is an OB/GYN, that's where I get the 1 in 400 rate from. Quick googling will tell you that the identical twin rate is 3 per thousand ( https://www.verywellfamily.com/identical-twins-2447126 ) or 4 per thousand ( https://twinsmagazine.com/incidence-of-twins-by-twin-type/ ), or half the rate of fraternal twins (the first link again, but this is false -- the rate of fraternal twinning depends on the parents' race, but the rate of identical twinning doesn't).

Why would you consider a clone to be a copy of a person? They share genetics, but not background, childhood memories, development, etc.

That's an interesting gut reaction. Meditating why would be an interesting exercise.

Almost all animals, us included, reject unknown things at first, likely because they might pose unknown dangers. Fortunately, humans are equipped to deal with that by understanding the real dangers, and decide if rejection is still necessary afterwards.

Or I could very well understand the thing deep enough and feel "no thanks".

To be fair, full human cloning is a thing that has no practical purpose IMO. Rich people can't beat death with clones because they don't inherit their memories, they would have to be raised like normal babies, and not-rich people can still make them the fun old cheap way.

The only practical purpose I can see of human cloning would be transplants, so we'd better learn to grow organs instead of people.

They do have purposes, however dubious and grim. Off the top of my head I can think of parents replacing dead children.

I don't understand why? They're just twin siblings of the DNA donor...

The weirdest form of racism is being prejudiced against groups that don't exist yet.

How would this be racism?

People use 'racism' to mean 'bigotry' in general these days. Whether you accept this or not depends on your stance on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.

I guess it is more aptly called bigotry. I was thinking along the lines of cloneship being a physical property of someone that's inherent to how they're produced (like how a newborn is probably going to be Black if its parents are Black) but the more I think about that the more it doesn't really apply because clones can really be any race.

putting the "pre" in prejudice.

PS: There's a wonderful This American Life story about a pair of ranchers who cloned their prize bull, Chance. Second Chance, the clone, wasn't quite what they expected.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/291/reunited-and-it-feels-s...

But why? A clone would be their very own person who just happens to have an identical genome to another person.

I see a potential issue if you were cloned while in uterus, making the other person potentially a twin with months difference in age, but not an actual twin because you did not share the same uterus or biological mother. So in the future, in the case you run into that person, there might be a chance of some temporary confusion/distress between you.

We've seen some movies in which ETs all look the same to us. They are like clones to our eyes. So maybe this is something that already inhabits our deeper imagination, and wouldn't be that bad if someday it happens to our kind. Who knows...

I bet identical twins REALLY turn your stomach too.

How do you know you aren't a clone?

Why?

- the fear of human control over things I consider 'out of line'

- the potential emotions behind the existence of the clone (lost sibling, child) .. heavy

How is the emotional aspect any different than an identical twin besides the age not exactly matching?

why do people keep bringing up twins..

Because they are naturally occurring clones? Sure, scientists have found some genetic variation, but they are incredibly close.

Creating clones would be interesting because we'd get to know more about the difference between a clone and a twin.

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